Defying the Frost King: Pioneer Life in Fact and Fiction

Pa Ingalls, frontier pioneer,  as illustrated by Garth Williams
for the Little House series.

I recently read a book that apparently has been astonishingly popular with a certain breed of woman.  No, not that book--I'm talking about Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life:  My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie.  It really took me back--I remember reading every one of the Little House books, some more than once (and also watching some of the television series later on) and while I don't really remember too many plot points, I am left with certain images--cozy log cabins with crackling fires, skating on frozen lakes, Pa playing his fiddle while the girls drift off to sleep in their nest-like loft. I do remember that Pa got lost in a blizzard right before Christmas at one point and ate the two oranges which were supposed to be Laura and Mary's Christmas treats.  After that I developed a thing for getting an orange in my Christmas stocking.  Wendy McClure found--and still finds, as an adult--these elegaic books so compelling that for some time she made a project of living, as she puts it, La Vida Laura--in other words, trying to recreate some of Laura's pioneer experiences, like churning her own butter, or baking bread with wheat she had ground by hand.  Chores as entertainment! She also makes a kind of pilgrimage with her very patient fiance, visiting all sorts of Laura-associated sites and events, like Laurapalooza (really, I'm not kidding), and a museum which has a photographic portrait of the real Charles Ingalls which left one visitor visibly shaken and squawking with disbelief (she was expecting someone more Michael Landon-esque).  At one point, McClure visits one of the Ingall's homes, an earthen dugout that was "smaller than a freight elevator", and muses that "the actual past and the Little House world had different properties."

Pa  "Beefcake" Ingalls on TV,  played  by Michael Landon 

Pa playing his iconic fiddle in the stage version of
"Little House on the Prairie".  The day's chores are
done, it's time to dance!

The real Ma and Pa Ingalls--Charles Ingalls and Caroline (Quiner) Ingalls.
Get a load of that beard!  Or is it a moustache?

After I read The Wilder Life, I went on to read Memoirs of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim. She played the villain Nellie Oleson in the TV show, and she has many hilarious stories to tell about people confusing the show with reality--for example, once she and the actress who played her mother visited a school to promote the series and were actually attacked by the schoolkids.  Also, she and Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura, became friends and when they were out together people would try to warn Melissa that Nellie Oleson was nearby.  This is when they were wearing regular clothing, not pioneer garb. And some of these people were grown adults!

Mean old Nellie Oleson has her say. 

Books like Little House that romanticize the frontier/pioneer experience have had a tremendous influence on how we think of "pioneer life".  Just for fun, I thought I'd look into the Ontario pioneer lifestyle which the Davis family would have lived.  It's described in a book called Historical Sketches of the County of Elgin, published by "The Elgin Historical and Scientific Institute" in St. Thomas, Ontario, in 1895.  It quotes an anonymous old-timer on the subject of pioneer life in Elgin County.  The William Davis family arrived from New York around 1809-1810, during the time this passage discusses.  I'm quoting here from pages 12-15.

"The first improvement of this settlement...was in 1810. In 1812 the Americans declared war against Great Britain, and Canada was the theatre of their operations:  so that improvement in the settlement was suspended for three years, which was a trying time for empty purses and lonely women, while the husbands were on duty to protect a home that was yet in embryo...The first act of a settler was with axe in hand to select a spot on which to erect a shanty;  then felling the huge trees...then the timber had to be cut piled and burned to form a starting point for further improvement.  The shanties were uniformly built of logs with elm bark for roof and floor. Then came the furniture which was invariably of home manufacture.  The bedstead was made of poles with bark taken off and basswood bark for bedcord, and the tools for its construction were an axe and an auger.  The table leaf was made from a piece of wood two inches thick, split from the centre of a large log, and holes made from a two inch auger to receive the legs;  the seats were tripods, the material and workmanship the same as the table.  Then cradles were ready for use by putting rockers to a sap-trough.  I knew one family where the same sap-trough served to rock four of their babies in succession."  

An illustration of a log shanty with bark roof. Notice there
are no windows.  A typical shanty would have only one room. 

Photograph of a log shanty with bark roof.  Notice the size
in relation to the family.  Notice also the catch hanging from the roof.
Typically mud would be used for caulking.   It doesn't seem to have a chimney...
I can't see it keeping out either cold or mosquitoes. 

"The mortar was indispensable in each family.  This article was made by cutting a log three feet long and 15 inches in diameter.  The log then stood on end and a fire kept burning in the centre till it formed a bowl-shaped concavity to hold ten or twelve quarts.  Into this a quart of corn was put and with a heavy wooden pestle pounded to the required degree of fineness, which process had to be repeated morning noon and night--or go without the indispensable johnny cake."

A "johnny cake" was a cornmeal flatbread.  Apparently the Little House Cookbook includes a recipe for this pioneer staple!

But back to our historical sketches.  The effect of the War of 1812 on shopping and provisions is described:

"'During the war', we are told, nearly all the settlers had to go to Port Ryerse for their salt, pay $12.00 a bushel for it and carry it home on their backs.  In the winter of 1813 I went to long point and paid $6.00 for 28 pounds, a neighbour offering to take it home in his sleigh.  He staid over night on the road, but left his load exposed, so that a cow destroyed the salt, killed herself, and caused me to return to replace the loss.  This necessitated 200 miles of travel on foot, and $12.00 in cash, to realize 28 pounds of salt.  During an unusual scarcity a pedlar came with a horse load.  I took 14 pounds for which I paid $8.00.  Two of my neighbours...went to Hamilton and paid $75.00 for a barrel, and allowing for their time, expense and team, it cost them $100.00.  But a few days after peace was proclaimed, and in a short time salt could be had at Port Ryerse for $12.00 a barrel."

Port Ryerse, in case you don't know,  is on Lake Erie, in Norfolk county, just west of Port Dover.  It's 36 miles west of Aylmer, 46 miles west of St. Thomas, "as the crow flies".  That's a painfully long walk with a bushel of salt on your back.

Perpetuating what I suspect is the Myth of the Happy Pioneer, Historical Sketches of Elgin County  assures us that early settlers, despite their lack of creature comforts,  had sunshiny temperaments: .

"The hardships, the privations, the discomforts of those earliest and even later days were very great and real,  though borne with great cheerfulness.  Bad roads, or none at all, scarcity of everything, except fuel and perhaps game, poor clothing, rude huts, rather than houses, the wolf literally at the door, or howling near it, every night--such seem to have been the common lot of all the first settlers... sheep were unknown in the Talbot settlement for the first ten or twenty years [perhaps because of the wolves],  flax forming the staple material for clothing.  The climate was quite as rigorous...then as now,--yet the hardy settlers battled with the forest and defied the frost king, despite the lack of woollen garments and other things accounted luxuries then--necessaries now." 

With all that hunting, though, wouldn't they have made themselves winter clothes out of animal fur?

To me, all this seems like a tremendously challenging undertaking, one that, if you lived through once, you wouldn't want to try again.  But with more of a sense of adventure than I have, one of William Davis's sons,  Edwin E. Davis (who was, obviously, also Adoniram Davis's brother and Minnie (Davis) Scott's uncle), moved to the Dakota frontier in the 1800s in search of land.  The Ingalls family lived in Dakota for a few years in the 1860s--we missed them by a measly two decades!